Satirizing Optimism

This week we finished our unit on satire on my English class and I feel that reading Candide introduced me to what satire is and made it into one of my favorite genres of literature. Voltaire criticizes several aspects of society, but his ultimate mockery is that life is destined to be miserable and that the world is not just. As I learned in class, satire is made up of four elements: hyperbole, irony, absurdity and a target, all which can be seen in Candide and help Voltaire mock the European society during the Age of Enlightenment and express his pessimistic philosophy. Although many times these elements are put all together, I will try to show how Voltaire used each in the book to mock his target.


To start off, hyperbole in Candide is ineluctable as it is what makes Voltaire able to satirize life. As he was trying to show that life is not fair, he used exaggerated situations to make it visible to the reader. Hyperbole can be seen simply in the miserable lives of all the characters, who get constantly imprisoned, attacked and simply fall in the misfortunes of the world, which highlight what Voltaire has to say about his targets. Exaggeration can be seen throughout the book, from the weight of the Baroness and the unwillingness of getting married because of the number of quarterings of the Baron's sister in the first page, to the overly unreasonable logic of Pangloss in the last page. Many of the characters suffer from too many unlucky events, like the stories each character tells Candide as they meet, like the old woman, or the Baron and Pangloss towards the end. Voltaire shows how unreasonable the Inquisition was by showing how the auto-da-fé was made under ridiculous reasons. In order to contrast the flaws of Europe and America with his idealistic society, Voltaire makes Eldorado a complete utopia, where people have huge amounts of wealth and live simply perfectly. To wrap up hyperbole, in Candide many of people's thoughts are made overemphasized to show how illogical they were, like that chocolate justified syphilis from the new world, or that noses are made so that people can wear spectacles.

The situations the characters face are an example of hyperbole as they move around the world and find obstacles and problems everywhere. 

Irony in Candide is mainly focused on the situations, to show that the ideas of the Age of Enlightenment were many times unreasonable. He mocks ideas like that everything was made for a reason, like that noses were made for people to wear spectacles or the constantly mentioned "cause and effect" in situation where things simply happened because of the unfairness of the world. It's also ironic that Pangloss, completely optimistic has such bad luck. All throughout Candide's life, he suffers from the most unlucky miseries, but as his name implies, is naïve and thus fails to see that the world is unfair. It is as well ironic that he struggles all his life to get Cunégonde and when he finally does, she is ugly and he doesn't really want to marry her. Irony is also used in specific targets such as the Catholic Church, as Pope Urban X has a princess daughter, Brother Giroflée is homosexual and the Church, instead of following God's will, is very cruel and irrational in things like the Inquisition. 

As it can be seen in the cover of this edition, ironically Candide is optimistic while he lives in misery. 

Absurdity in Candide is also seen from the very beginning, where a second cover page says that the book was translated from the German by Dr. Ralph, a complete absurdity. Throughout the book you can see that Voltaire uses small unrelated details that simply  give you a laugh sometimes and contribute to the satire. For instance, things like mentioning the height of Candide in one of the first chapters, having two Guarani girls be infatuated with two monkeys or saying that Brother Giroflée finally became "Turk" are some cases where Voltaire adds unrelated and unexpected details that make his work more humorous. Many times he also over explains what is happening and characters have unusual responses, like when Cunégonde is telling Candide how she was raped and imprisoned by the Bulgars, and all he replies is that he'd be interested in seeing her wound. Voltaire combines many of the elements of satire, like naming the German town Thunder-ten-Tronckh, which is partly absurdity but mostly hyperbole. The same happens with Pangloss' job, being a métaphysico-théologo-cosmolonigologist. 

Details like that is was translated by Dr. Ralph are an example of  how Voltaire uses absurdity to mock his target, in this case the Germans. 

As it can be seen in the previous paragraphs, Voltaire uses all these elements of literature to criticize a target, as satire does. He mainly shows that the world is not fair and that we have to toil to survive it, as he explains in the last chapter, but along the way he mocks many other things, like feudalism, or military, religion, infatuation, the use of wealth or the whole of Germany. Throughout Candide, Voltaire ridicules feudalism and the illogical wars or social segregation it brought. He makes fun of the irony of religion and the overrated romantic relations. Many times he shows that wealth wasn't being used well (and all those things that triggered the French Revolution) and the irrational philosophies of the enlightened, many times in Germany. In conclusion, as the book's title directly says, Voltaire shows that the world is unfair, while he mocks optimism, basically by satirizing the life an optimistic yet miserable person.